Category: culture

Happy Chinese New Year!

The year of the pig is right around the corner! Every since I have been back in the US I have been surprised at how many references to Chinese New Year (CNY) I see here. This year, I saw a mailer from Office Depot, special CNY mums at Trader Joe’s (?) and an ad from Kate Spade. The lunar new year is probably one of the most widely celebrated holiday in the world, so it shouldn’t be surprising to see references to it everywhere. Yet, it still is part of our job as Chinese language educators to teach our students and communities about the holiday.

It’s Chinese New Year Y’all

Chinese New Year Or….

Chinese New Year is more commonly known as Spring Festival in China. That is direct translation of the most common Chinese name for it: 春节. People also often refer to the holiday as the lunar new year. This is also an umbrella term that includes the holiday as it is celebrated in other countries. These include Korean New Year or Tet in Vietnam. Here is San Antonio we have the annual Asian Festival at the Institute of Texan Cultures which coincides with the lunar new year and it includes a variety of different cultures.

Students should at the very least know that Spring Festival is another word for Chinese New Year. They should also know that it is the first day of spring in the traditional Chinese calendar. There is of course so much more to learn. It really depends on time and other factors how much we explore this holiday. I write more here about why it is okay to use English when learning about culture in class sometimes. Just knowing the basic facts about this holiday is the absolute minimum, and where we go from there depends on how much class time we have, student interest, and what their prior knowledge is.

More than Just Lip-service

It used to be that even including something about Spring Festival in k-12 was a check box on a list for including diversity. Now, educators, students and parents are a lot want more than just lip-service towards diversity. We are not just ticking boxes anymore. In recent years there has been a push to do more than just talk about “food and flags.” That is a great goal and good lessons about culture will always do more than just ask students to identify what foods we eat at Chinese New Year.

Making Dumplings for Chinese New Year

Including Chinese New Year in a Meaningful Way

We know that a good use of class time is to give students comprehensible input in the target language. That means that playing board games with Chinese characters on the spaces or coloring pictures of dragons is not really a good use of time. The students are not hearing or reading anything in Chinese that they can understand. One idea for a class that is looking to do something meaningful for Spring Festival is to have the students first learn about the holiday through videos/slide shows/pictures/etc and then plan a party. They will get the input they need through the introduction of the holiday in Chinese. Then they actually get to make something (a party) that is meaningful to them.

Getting the red envelopes ready for the kids!

Have a suggestion for how to include Chinese New Year in a language class? Leave it in the comments!

How are Large Numbers in Chinese Different?

Chinese numbers can be annoying for language students. The numbers for 1-100 seem easy enough. Twenty (二十) is literally “two ten” and thirty (三十) is literally “three ten” and so on. It is the large numbers that give students trouble. In English, one million is 1,000,000 but in Chinese we write it as 100万, which is more like “one hundred ten thousand.”

For students, thinking one million as “one hundred times ten thousand” can seem like… a lot of math. This can be especially distressing for students who chose to study Mandarin Chinese because they want a challenge that is not a STEM class. So do students have to do multiplication problems with large numbers just to use numbers in Chinese? No they don’t. Just like any other aspect of language, students will be able to use the correct words as long as they have heard and read enough input that includes those numbers. Students can learn anything with enough repetition.

Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

Even though students can learn anything (when it comes to language) with enough repetition, we still have what Stephen Krashen calls the affective filter. As mentioned in an earlier post, high levels of anxiety, embarrassment, etc. can raise students affective filters and make it more difficult for students to learn. When students first encounter large numbers the Chinese way, they often resist because they are different to how we write large numbers in English. Giving students lots of input that included large numbers in context is one way to lessen the natural feelings of anxiety about Chinese numbers.

Getting Input with Real Estate Advertisements from Chinese Cities

The key to language acquisition is comprehensible input. Comprehensible input is language that students hear/read and (crucially) understand. For adult students, one way to give students a lot of input that includes large numbers is through…. real estate advertisements! Looking at real estate ads, we see the “easy” numbers. For example, the apartment is on the 16th floor, and it is 80 square meters. Ads also have large numbers for the prices. If you look at real estate ads for Shanghai or Beijing you are guaranteed to see prices that are in the millions and tens of millions (RMB).

Real estate ads are also a way to use authentic resources (authres) in the classroom. They are short so the students do not get overwhelmed. They are also a good spring board for further cultural discussions. Buying a home is very important in both American and Chinese cultures. But there are differences in the age of first time home buyers, living arrangements and what people value in a home.

This could be a basis of a discussion on buying a home in China vs the US

Conclusion

As with everything else in language learning, students learn through getting input in a meaningful context. When we focus on creating meaning and using repetition, students can acquire anything. Even something as annoying as large numbers in Chinese!

Interested in learning more about Mandarin Chinese classes at Lotus Chinese Learning? Please get in touch!

Making Culture Level and Age Appropriate

Most language educators agree that it is important to include at least some component of culture in a language class. Chinese culture is of course, very rich. Chinese civilization has a long history from which to draw. It is also true however, that we have to do what works with our students. Adult students can sit through (and enjoy!) a 45-minute presentation on gift-giving in China, but that would be a disaster for lower elementary students. Culture lessons need to be appropriate for their audience.

Chinese Paper Cutting with a Halloween Theme

When holidays come around, it can be a nice time to work in more culture to the material. However, the calendar does not always cooperate. Chinese Valentine’s Day (七夕) can be a good story for kids, but it occurs in summer when we are out of class. Likewise, there is a big yawning gap for major Chinese holidays between Mid-Autumn Festival (typically in September) and Chinese New Year (late January-February). To channel the holiday enthusiasm and include more Chinese culture in the curriculum, this year I combined Halloween with Chinese paper cutting.

Example of Pumpkin Chinese Paper Cutting

Chinese paper cutting is a traditional handicraft. Generally, paper cuttings are just used for decoration in China. Halloween is not “a thing” in China really, but I do have a book of paper cutting designs that are meant for kids. In it are plenty of paper cuttings that fit a Halloween theme.

As long as the kids understand that Halloween is not really a Chinese holiday, then I think that doing Chinese paper cutting for a special class on or near Halloween works. We can cover at least one aspect of culture (a traditional handicraft) while also recognizing that kids are usually bouncing off the walls around Halloween. We probably won’t be able to cover as much material as we do normally, so it is good to channel that energy to something else.

It’s a bat!

Chinese Paper Cutting with Other Holidays and Festivals

This year, with some of my kiddos, we made Chinese paper cuttings of bats, pumpkins and spiders. This same idea, of combining Chinese paper cutting with the non-Chinese holiday of Halloween could work with other holidays. My book of paper cutting ideas for kids has Christmas trees and presents designs (if your school observes Christmas). It also has ears of corn, pumpkins and apples that could tie into Thanksgiving… and many more possibilities.

It is a challenge to incorporate culture into a language class in a way that is age and language level appropriate. Do you have any additional ideas for how to do it? Share in the comments!

Paper Cutting Book for Kids

Interested in learning more about Mandarin Chinese classes at Lotus Chinese Learning? Get in touch via the contact page!

What is Mid-Autumn Festival?

This year (2018), Mid-Autumn festival falls on September 24. For Mid-Autumn Festival, we gather with our families, looks at the moon, and eat mooncakes. Mooncakes are the fruitcakes of Chine: a holiday-oriented dessert that some people love and some people love to hate. In China, companies give boxes of mooncakes as gifts to their employees. Even when I was a student, one year the university gave all the foreign students boxes of mooncakes (probably because we paid so much more in tuition than our Chinese counterparts:)). Like many traditional festivals in China, Mid-Autumn Festival has an associated legend. The legend of Chang’e, like many other traditional stories, can be a good basis for story listening.

Mooncakes! Pictured are the popular Guangdong-style mooncakes. There are many other varieties available in China.

What is story listening?

In story listening, a teacher tells the class a story (often a legend or folktale), using pictures, gestures, and sometimes translation to help the students understand the story. The goal is for the students to fully understand the story. It is not necessary for them to be able to retell it in the target language, although that may be part of some lesson plans. Critics of story listening say that it is too teacher-centered. While the teacher usually does stand at the front of class and talk to the students, everything she does is oriented to their level. It is actually completely student-oriented.

The Legend of Chang’e and Houyi

A teacher can modify the telling of the legend of Chang’e and Houyi for students of various levels. One challenge for story listening is helping students keep track of the characters. Chang’e and Houyi are the main characters of the legend of Mid-Autumn Festival. I pre-print out illustrations of them to help with the story telling. Houyi is supposed to be a man of exceptional strength, so a photo of a muscly guy helps get the point across. There are several other characters that may be included in the telling of the legend, but to keep things simple for beginner students, I leave them out. There is something remembering names in a second language that is difficult. Having the character illustrations with the name illustrations really helps students keep track of who is who.

Pictures of the characters help students keep track of who is in the story

Formative Assessment with Story Listening

After I tell the story, I want to make sure that the students understand pretty much everything that I said. There is a very easy way to do this. I just ask the students to repeat the story back to me in English. Lots of people believe that in a good language classrooms, students should use English as little as possible. I believe that classroom time is precious and students should get as much input as possible. Efforts to completely stamp out the use of English are misguided, however. Simply put, it is easier to ban English (or any other L1) than it is to ensure quality teaching. Furthermore, the goal for beginners is not to have them speaking Mandarin Chinese all the time. They can’t do it anyway. Rather, the goal is for them to understand everything that they hear. An easy, fast, an straightforward way to check for this is to have them summarize the story in English. If there are mistakes in the summary, then I know that I have not told the story in the best way for their level.

Teaching Culture with Story Listening

Story listening is great for teaching language, but it is also great for teaching culture. Folktales are great source material for story listening. Chinese culture certainly has many to choose from. Sometimes when traditional holidays roll around, the students are just not ready (either in terms of their language ability or their maturity) to listen to a folktale in Chinese. This is especially true for younger students. If one of the goals of a program is teaching about culture, it can be perfectly time to take a break from the language component and just focus on the culture. There are many books available in English that teach students about Mid-Autumn Festival. Teachers can use them to do a quick segment in English on that aspect of the culture.

If you are in Shanghai, you will hear a lot of Shanghaiese, but perhaps not a lot of Mandarin. The locals heavily favor their own dialect.

There is not just one Chinese Language

Summer is almost here and many students of Mandarin Chinese will go to China or Taiwan to do a summer intensive language course. It is quite common for students to step off of the plane and then feel disappointed that they cannot understand any of the local Chinese people. Perhaps these students do not understand Mandarin Chinese as well as they thought they did. Just as likely though, there is another culprit: dialects.

Most students arrive on their first day of Mandarin class knowing that there is a difference between Mandarin and Cantonese. There are actually many, many different dialects spoken in China. We use the English word Mandarin generally as a translation of the word 普通话 (Putonghua), the official language of the People’s Republic of China. 国语 (Guoyu) and 汉语 (Hanyu) can also be translated as Mandarin. Mandarin or Putonghua is the official language of China and Taiwan*, but in reality every city has its own dialect.

They are Not Just Dialects of Standard Chinese

The word dialect is actually a very misleading term when we talk about the spoken languages of China. It implies that there is mutual intelligibility between the different dialects, and this is very often not the case. A better term is topolect. A long discussion of what a topolect is and why we should use that term instead of the word dialect is here. In short, a topolect is a language of a particular region of China. Every city or area you go to has its own topolect. Some of the more well-known ones are Sichuanese, Shanghaiese, Hakka, and Cantonese.

Some of these topolects are more closely related to each other than others, but they are not necessarily dialects of Mandarin. They could be just as different from each other as English and Spanish. In theory, all educated people in China speak Mandarin as well as their native topolect. Especially outside the big cities however, this is not always the case. If travelers who are proficient in Mandarin have trouble in China, it is often because they are speaking to people who do not speak Mandarin fluently.

Keep the Topolects in Mind as You Travel

Even in big cities, proficient Mandarin speakers might have some trouble. Shanghai and Chengdu are two popular cities for foreign travelers. Local Shanghaiese love their local topolect. They speak it at every opportunity, even if it irritates their fellow countrymen and women. Chengdu loves Sichuanese so much that they even discussed making it one of the languages for announcements in their metro system.

The many topolects of China can make life difficult for any traveler in the country, even if they are Chinese themselves. Keep in mind that if your Mandarin skills are not getting you as far as you would like, it might be because those around you are not speaking it!

Have you had any frustrating experiences because of the many topolects (dialects) of China? Share in the comments!